The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [11]
‘Bobrowski began his military career in a Russian rifle regiment.’ Pennistone had told me. ‘He was praporschik – ensign, as usually translated – at the same time that Kielkiewicz was an aspirant – always a favourite rank of mine – in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry.’
Hanging his cap on one of the hooks by the door, Pennistone went upstairs at once to get orders from Finn about the news from Iran. Polish GHQ must have received the information simultaneously from their own sources – reports almost always comprehensive, if at times highly coloured – because Michalski, one of General Kielkiewicz’s ADCs, came through on the telephone just after Pennistone had left the room, seeking to arrange an interview with everyone from the Chief of the Imperial General Staff downwards. He was followed almost immediately on the line by Horaczko, one of Bobrowski’s assistants, with the same end in view for his master. We were on easy terms with both Michalski and Horaczko, so temporizing was not too difficult, though clearly fresh and more urgent solicitations would soon be on the way.
Michalski, now in his late thirties, had served like Bobrowski with the Polish contingent in France. Of large size, sceptical about most matters, he belonged to the world of industrial design – statuettes for radiator caps and such decorative items – working latterly in Berlin, which had left some mark on him of its bitter individual humour. In fact Pennistone always said talking to Michalski made him feel he was sitting in the Romanisches Café. His father had been a successful portrait painter, and his grandfather before him, stretching back to a long line of itinerant artists wandering over Poland and Saxony.
‘Painting pictures that are now being destroyed as quickly as possible,’ Michalski said.
He was accomplished at providing thumbnail sketches of the personalities at the Titian, the former hotel, subdued, Edwardian in tone, where headquarters of the Polish army in exile was established. Uncle Giles had once stayed there in days gone by, a moment when neither the Ufford nor the De Tabley had been able to accommodate him at short notice. ‘I’ll be bankrupt if I ever do it again,’ he had declared afterwards, a financial state all his relations in those days supposed him to be in anyway.
Horaczko had reached England in a different manner from Michalski, and only after a lot of adventures. As an officer of the Reserve, he had begun the Eastern campaign on horseback, cantering about at the head of a troop of lancers, pennons flying, like one of the sequences of War and Peace, to intercept the advancing German armour. Executive in a Galician petroleum plant, he was younger than Michalski, having – as Pennistone and I agreed – some of the air of the junior lead in a drawing-room comedy, the young lover perhaps. When Poland was overrun on two fronts, Horaczko had avoided capture and internment, probably death, by escaping through Hungary. Both he and Michalski held the rank of second-lieutenant. While I was still speaking to Horaczko on the telephone, our clerk, Corporal Curtis, brought in a lot more stuff to be dealt with, additional, that is, to the formidable pile lying on the desk when I came in from breakfast
‘Good morning, Curtis.’
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘How are things?’
Curtis, a studious-looking young man, whose military career had been handicapped by weak eyesight, was a henchman of notable efficiency and wide interests. He had once confessed to Pennistone that he had read through the whole of Grote’s History of Greece.
‘A rather disturbing letter from the Adjutant-General’s branch, sir.’
‘Oh, Lord.’
‘But not so bad as my first premonition on reading it. In fact, sir, I all but perpetrated a schoolboy howler in that connexion.’
‘Impossible.’
‘On the subject of redundant Polish officers taking commissions in West African units of our own forces